Counterfeiting bitcoin

[odolvlobo]

What if someone made exact copy of bitcoin? Exactly the same way bitcoin works and created new bitcoins. Would the miners see it and not let the transations trough or is this possible?

I had a similar thought:  What if there was some way to counterfeit btc so that if you went to send it, it appeared ok, but would never process through the network.

So say you went to meet someone and sell an item for btc.  They "send" the fake btc to yoru address, everything looks good so you go your separate ways only to find out no btc were actually sent.  I mean no one is going to sit around for an hour waiting for things to be confirmed.  Is it possible this could happen?

Read the thread. Such a scam is only possible if the victim uses a fake wallet.

[RodeoX]

An "exact" copy would be bitcoin. But ANY change in the code, even one letter of the code, would cause a fork because it would be rejected by the network.

[Hazir]

What if someone made exact copy of bitcoin? Exactly the same way bitcoin works and created new bitcoins. Would the miners see it and not let the transations trough or is this possible?

Yes, this is possible.  It is called: "Litecoin"

From what I know it is not the same at all. The litecoin network is  scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as bitcoin.
And this is just one thing that comes to my mind. I am sure there are many more differences between litecoin and bitcoin. Also the blockchain is different...

[ObscureBean]

What if someone made exact copy of bitcoin? Exactly the same way bitcoin works and created new bitcoins. Would the miners see it and not let the transations trough or is this possible?

I had a similar thought:  What if there was some way to counterfeit btc so that if you went to send it, it appeared ok, but would never process through the network.

So say you went to meet someone and sell an item for btc.  They "send" the fake btc to yoru address, everything looks good so you go your separate ways only to find out no btc were actually sent.  I mean no one is going to sit around for an hour waiting for things to be confirmed.  Is it possible this could happen?

Tricking the whole network would be impossible but tricking one person is definitely possible. You pc would definitely have to have been hacked, it couldn't happen if you're for example running Bitcoin core that hasn't been tampered with because it will simply not show fake BTC, let alone network confirmation. This kind of trickery will only work if you're careless though.

[QuestionAuthority]

 

Sybil attack

An attacker can attempt to fill the network with clients controlled by him, you would then be very likely to connect only to attacker nodes. Although Bitcoin never uses a count of nodes for anything completely isolating a node from the honest network can be helpful in the execution of other attacks.

This state can be exploited in (at least) the following ways:

The attacker can refuse to relay blocks and transactions from everyone, disconnecting you from the network.
The attacker can relay only blocks that he creates, putting you on a separate network. You're then open to double-spending attacks.
If you rely on transactions with 0 confirmations, the attacker can just filter out certain transactions to execute a double-spending attack.
Low-latency encryption/anonymization of Bitcoin's transmissions (With Tor, JAP, etc.) can be defeated relatively easy with a timing attack if you're connected to several of the attacker's nodes and the attacker is watching your transmissions at your ISP.
Bitcoin makes these attacks more difficult by only making an outbound connection to one IP address per /16 (x.y.0.0). Incoming connections are unlimited and unregulated, but this is generally only a problem in the anonymity case, where you're probably already unable to accept incoming connections.

[peligro]

But it could be possible to temporarily fake a human out and make them think they had real bitcoin which is all that is required for an effective counterfeiting operation.  Eventually the sucker will find out their duped but by then the thief could be long gone.

I disagree. How would you want to scam the other person? He would check his own wallet and see that nothing is there. If he really would accept a wallet, screenshot or block explorer showing him that there are coins then he could be fooled by an easier scam attempt too.

[TrueBeliever]

But it could be possible to temporarily fake a human out and make them think they had real bitcoin which is all that is required for an effective counterfeiting operation.  Eventually the sucker will find out their duped but by then the thief could be long gone.

I like the question, it is forcing us to think about Bitcoin from a newbie perspective again. and @grendel25 has pointed out an interesting scenario, setting up a fake bitcoin network, with fake wallet and all.  agreed this would only dupe a newbie who hasn't done their groundwork... but how many Bitcoin newbies are there out there to be picked off...

I can see the new Nigerian scam, download your new wallet from "here" and lets transact.